Newsletter articles and any other writing — speaking too! — can be improved if you cut out “hollow and meaningless” business language. This gobbledygook is also known as jargon monoxide, a wonderful term I discovered this week in a tweet by Stanford professor Bob Sutton, aka @work_matters. He in turn credits author Polly Labarre for creating it.
I was already thinking about jargon, after running into dozens of mentions of incentivize, utilize, skillsets and other awkward words this week. Find out more about words to avoid, better options to say the same thing and a handy test if you aren’t sure if a word is jargon or not in the August issue of my monthly newsletter.
Wordnerdery is a quick read about words, effective/expressive writing, newsletters and more. Are you a subscriber? If yes, thanks for reading! If not, you can sign up here. In keeping with Canada’s new anti-spam laws, you can easily unsubscribe any time.
Related reading:
5 ways to improve readability, including simple words
Every industry has its jargon, or what I sometimes call “a secret handshake”